The Emerson Circle of the Unitarian Society of Ridgewood Cordially invites you to a talk by Award-winning author Megan Marshall Margaret Fuller and the Peabody Sisters: The Origins of an American Women’s Movement in Unitarian-Transcendentalism A Talk by Megan Marshall Thursday, February 12th at 7:00pm We tend to think of American feminism beginning with the suffrage movement, but where did those ideas come from? New England women provided an overlooked impetus in a groundswell of “Conversation” and writing provoked by the questioning era of 1840s Transcendentalism. In fact, Margaret Fuller’s Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1853) not only set the stage for activism in its own time, it anticipated 20th- and 21st-century critiques of “socially constructed” gender roles for both women and men. Male and female “are perpetually passing into one another,” Fuller wrote, “there is no wholly masculine man, no purely feminine woman”—a statement that was shocking in its time and still reverberates today. Award-winning author Megan Marshall will discuss her two prize-winning biographies, her research and fascination with these founders of American feminism whose network of friends (and husbands!) included Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Horace Mann.

Megan Marshall is the author of Margaret Fuller: A New American Life, winner of the 2014 Pulitzer Prize in Biography, and The Peabody Sisters: Three Women Who Ignited American Romanticism, winner of the Francis Parkman Prize, the Mark Lynton History Prize, and finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2006. She is currently the Gilder Lehrman Fellow at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers of the New York Public Library, and has held fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. An Associate Professor at Emerson College where she teaches nonfiction writing in the MFA program, Marshall’s essays and reviews have appeared in the New Yorker, the Atlantic, the New York Times Book Review, the London Review of Books, and elsewhere. For more information about the author, visit: www.meganmarshallauthor.com

The Unitarian Society of Ridgewood $15 113 Cottage Place, Tickets can be purchased at the door. Ridgewood, NJ 07450 Light refreshments.

Child care available with 2 weeks notice. Please contact Carol Loscalzo @ [email protected]